Unions improve jobs at the bottom

Shawn Fremstad and John Schmitt argue on the website Fairer Globalization that unions improve low-wage jobs. While I don't agree with all the positions of organized labor in the US, I believe that workers must be allowed to unionize if they choose. It's important to have this context considering the furor over the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would reduce the ability of US employers to exert undue influence over workers as they organize.


In recent decades, many politicians, policymakers, and even some antipoverty advocates have come to the view that low-wage jobs are an inevitable part of a growing economy. Some go so far as to celebrate the growth of low-wage work and low-wage employers like Wal-Mart as part of a "progressive success story" benefiting workers, consumers, and owners of capital by lowering prices and increasing productivity.

Individuals who hold this view often acknowledge that low-wage work doesn't pay enough to make ends meet. To address this problem, they promote increased public funding for in-work benefits in order to "make work pay." These benefits, which are typically targeted to parents in low-income households, include ones that supplement cash income (the Earned Income Tax Credit), provide health insurance (Medicaid and SCHIP, which covers children), and offer direct assistance for other work expenses, expenses that, for higher-income workers, are subsidized in part through the tax code (such as child care and transportation). During the 1990s, the states and the federal government did expand some of these kinds of in-work benefits, while at the same time reducing the availability of income supplements (most notably, the now-defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and its replacement Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)).

According to the conventional view, the meager pay and limited benefits of low-wage jobs reflect the limitations of the workers holding these jobs, and increases in inequality and declines in middle-class jobs are explained by an increase in the return for skills and education driven by globalization and technology. Those who hold this view, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, often acknowledge the problem of increasing inequality but put forward education and training as a silver bullet that will solve the problem.

Generally absent from this approach is any focus on reforming the labor market to improve the quality of low- and moderate-wage jobs. While some proponents of the make-work-pay strategy are simply agnostic on labor-market reform, others openly oppose reforms they characterize as "intervening" in the labor market.

The economic history of the last half a century in the United States suggests the agnostic approach will do little to promote shared prosperity. As MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin have recently shown in an important National Bureau of Economics Research working paper, a greatly diminished role for labor-market institutions in promoting shared prosperity marks a significant difference between the recent decades of rising inequality in the United States and the immediate post–World War II period of mass upward mobility, when institutional concerns were at the forefront.

Of course, education, training, and in-work supports offer genuine benefits to low-wage workers. Where these policies are sufficiently generous and accessible, they can make a substantial contribution to improving the quality of life of low-wage workers. Nevertheless, an exclusive focus on low-wage workers rather than the failings of low-wage jobs has important limitations. The reality is that mobility out of low-wage work is surprisingly low. Most low-wage workers are adults already well into their work lives, not young people just starting out their careers. Recent research suggests that growth in low-wage (and very high-wage) jobs outpaced growth in middle-wage jobs in the 1990s, and projections of future employer demand suggests that most of today's low-wage occupations will be at least as numerous in the future as they are today.

More than 40 million jobs in the United States—about one in three—pay low wages. Even though expanding low-wage workers' access to high-quality skills training and education will help more low-wage workers move into better jobs, low-wage jobs constitute such a large share of jobs in the economy that expanded access to training and education provide only one prong of a multipronged strategy necessary to maintain and expand the middle class.

An approach based on strengthening labor-market institutions complements, rather than conflicts with, the make-work-pay agenda. Key elements of such an approach include enforcing and enhancing existing labor standards such as the minimum wage and other wage and hour standards, and establishing new basic labor standards, such as minimum guarantees of paid vacation, sick pay, and parental leave. Another essential element is the strengthening and encouraging of collective bargaining through greater unionization. By improving the bargaining power of low-wage workers, unionization promotes better pay, benefits, and working conditions.

In a new research study, we, along with Margy Waller and Ben Zipperer, take a closer look at the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits of low-wage jobs. The data suggest that even after controlling for differences between union and nonunion workers, union representation substantially improves the pay and benefits offered in what are otherwise low-paying occupations. On average, in the 15 important low-wage occupations we analyzed, unionization raised workers' wages by just over 16 percent—about $1.75 per hour—compared to similar, but nonunion, workers. The union impact on health-insurance and pension coverage in low-wage jobs was even bigger. Union workers in low-wage occupations were 25 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, as well as 25 percentage points more likely to be in an employer-provided pension.

These union effects are large by any measure. Consider that between 1996 and 2000, a period of sustained low unemployment that helped to produce the best wage growth for low-wage workers in the last three decades, the real wage of 10th percentile workers rose, in total, about 12 percent. By comparison, at 16 percent, the union wage effect was one third larger than the full impact of four years of historically rapid real wage growth. Over the same boom period in the 1990s, health and pension coverage among the bottom fifth of workers rose only about three percentage points for health insurance (up 3.2 percentage points) and pensions (up 2.7 percent), about one-eighth of the impact of unionization on health and pension coverage among low-wage occupations we analyzed. The union effects are particularly impressive given the widespread belief that many of the jobs we examined are inherently incapable of providing decent pay and benefits.

The National Labor Relations Act, enacted by Congress in 1935, declares that it is the policy of the United States to encourage collective bargaining and to protect "the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection." While the NLRA remains on the books, unionization has steadily declined in the United States, in large part because of a failure to actively encourage and protect workers' full freedom of association.

The findings of our study demonstrate that the exercise of these basic and long-standing rights results in better wages and benefits for low-wage workers. Our findings complement other research, much of it summarized in the recent book What Do Unions Do? A Twenty-Year Perspective, suggesting that unions reduce employee turnover and wage inequality, and increase access to sick pay and annual leave. Taken together, these positive effects of collective bargaining argue that unionization is a key element of an effective strategy to build a stronger and more inclusive economy.

In this sense, unionization does more than boost wages. It also promotes social inclusion—the ability for workers, even those in low-wage occupations, to participate fully in the social and economic life of their communities.

Given the prevalence of low-wage jobs without benefits in our labor market, and the likelihood that these sectors will grow rather than decline, some attention to the strategy of improving the jobs is critical to strengthening our economy and communities. Unless these jobs are improved, our nation will permanently consign a large portion of workers in the United States to bad jobs. If this happens, we will be weaker as a nation.


This article is available under a Creative Commons license.

Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan appoints Bishop who learned meditation and compassion from Zen Buddhists. The fucking conservatives get uptight

The Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan has elected Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester to be their bishop. Ruth Gledhill has good things to say about the new Bishop-elect on her blog for the Times in the UK. Sadly, some people are not happy.

Kevin Thew Forrester, The Episcopal Church's latest bishop-elect, is in trouble with the conservatives in the Anglican Communion because he has used the practices of Zen Buddhism to deepen his relationship with God and Jesus. He has also taken part in a ceremony that in the world of Buddhism is described as a 'lay ordination' but in which there is no laying-on of hands and which is a ceremony about embracing a life of compassion that bears absolutely no resemblance to ordination as Christians understand it.

Back in the 1970s, my own father in his ministry as a deeply-orthodox Anglican clergyman used to go for study retreats to Mirfield, the UK's main centre at the time of Anglo-Catholic contemplative spirituality. His spiritual director there suggested he learn Zen techniques of meditation to help him on his Christian spiritual journey. For three years, at my request he took me with him to the Zen yoga classes in a little school hall outside Uttoxeter. I started at about 12. This was the 1970s in remote Staffordshire, so there were no candles, no incense, just dusty bare floorboards and baking oil-fired radiators. We had an exotic young woman teacher with mirrored skirts who seemed to come from another planet. Our silences were punctuated by the sounds of mooing cows clomping by at milking time. The practices I learned there serve me to this day.

The conservatives at Stand Firm are making a huge issue of this. Perhaps I should visit with the Zen Buddhists, but what the fuck is their problem?

James Dobson resigns as chair of Focus on the Family

James Dobson has resigned as chair of Focus on the Family, the conservative Evangelical organization.

Some say that his resignation and the broader defeats that conservative Evangelicals have sustained may well do Focus on the Family in. That would be the best outcome.

However, FoF may not die, as Richard Land (chair of the Southern Baptist Convention) says in the conservative newspaper Washington Times:

"There's no one with quite the niche Dobson has," said Mr. Land, who also made Time magazine's list. "He's not a minister but a psychologist. That puts him in a unique category. No one person will succeed him. You'll see a broader group of leaders with their own constituencies, but not a narrow band."

But, he cautioned, "Anyone who thinks evangelicals are going away as a social force is smoking something illegal."

That, perhaps, is an alternative that we can live with. An author at US News argues that Dobson's cult of personality kept FoF from connecting with younger Christians, effectively making the organization irrelevant. I would prefer that FoF die completely, but having them finally embrace global issues that are of genuine concern to Christians would also be acceptable.

Meanwhile, good riddance to Jim.

Academic endowments: the curse of hoarded treasure

A Businessweek article argues that U.S. universities are cutting budgets and shortchanging today's students to risk what's left of their endowments in financial markets. Harvard relies on its endowment for 30% of annual operating funds, and Yale gets 45% of its annual operating budget from the endowment.

Is there a better way? There could be. Here's an idea: Maybe rich universities should act more like companies, which somehow manage to operate without endowments. Universities could raise just as much money from wealthy alumni and other donors as they do now, but they wouldn't hoard it in a great big piggy bank. They'd spend it as it came in, the way companies spend their revenue on current needs.
Why must universities Hoard money?

Most universities that aren't super-wealthy already do behave like companies because they have little choice: They don't pile up endowments because they have urgent current needs for the money. Take California State University at Long Beach, where about a third of undergraduates are first-generation college students. The school does raise money from alumni and other sources, but it puts most of the proceeds to use right away for such purposes as scholarships. In a Feb. 27 interview, President F. King Alexander said: "Our students need that money. We're not wealthy enough to sock it away when we have so many needs on our campus right now."

Any ordinary company that followed the money-hoarding strategy embraced by such institutions as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford would soon receive an inquisitive letter from the likes of raider Carl Icahn, who would want the CEO to explain why he or she couldn't find anything more useful to do with the money than stash it away. It's a fair question, both for companies and for universities.

The most frequent argument for having a big endowment is that it's supposed to tide schools over tough times. It sure isn't working out that way. True endowment funds can't be spent even in an emergency; only the cash income and capital gains from them can be spent. (Does anyone remember what capital gains are these days?) So-called quasi-endowment funds can be drawn down if necessary, but universities seem loath to do so even in the current circumstances, as if preserving capital is a higher priority than preserving academic programs.

Some of the larger and richer universities made things worse for themselves by investing in private equity and other illiquid investments that are harder to get out of. During the boom times, that seemed like a good strategy. Yale and Harvard's investment managers were highly regarded and became a bit like superstars.

The article also argues that assuming living standards continue to rise, saving donations for the endowment, as opposed to spending them in the general fund, can be tantamount to robbing present day students to give to future ones.

This is potentially an issue for many nonprofits, such as churches. The Episcopal Church has an endowment. Given that we are not a rapidly growing church in general, I'd argue that it's justifiable to continue to fund our endowments. However, one could make a counterargument to that.

Anyway, in closing:

Human foibles may be a better explanation for the accumulation of huge endowments, Hansmann seems to conclude. On the supply side of funding, he writes, "many donors restrict their gifts for use as endowment, not to advance education and knowledge, but to purchase a bit of personal immortality."

On the demand side, boards of trustees may solicit funds for endowment rather than current spending simply because they like the idea of presiding over a big pile of money: "It may be that, consciously or unconsciously," he writes, "university trustees tend to focus on the size of the university's retained earnings (that is, its endowment) as a measure of the success of the management of the institution." That amounts to collecting money for money's sake. Adds Hansmann: "One sometimes has the sense that universities compete among themselves to have the largest endowment."

Memo to the board of trustees: You're supposed to be running a service business here, not piling up treasure.

NYT Op Ed: How Words Could End a War

A New York Times op ed by an anthropology professor argues that symbolic gestures, such as Hamas recognizing Israel's right to exist or Israel apologizing for the displacement of civilians in the 1948 war, can have huge effects on the willingness of adversaries to compromise. Professor Atran argues that these symbolic gestures are more likely to bring peace than offers of material rewards - something that Western negotiators have so far failed to realize.


AS diplomats stitch together a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most depressing feature of the conflict is the sense that future fighting is inevitable. Rational calculation suggests that neither side can win these wars. The thousands of lives and billions of dollars sacrificed in fighting demonstrate the advantages of peace and coexistence; yet still both sides opt to fight.

This small territory is the world’s great symbolic knot. “Palestine is the mother of all problems” is a common refrain among people we have interviewed across the Muslim world: from Middle Eastern leaders to fighters in the remote island jungles of Indonesia; from Islamist senators in Pakistan to volunteers for martyrdom on the move from Morocco to Iraq.

Some analysts see this as a testament to the essentially religious nature of the conflict. But research we recently undertook suggests a way to go beyond that. For there is a moral logic to seemingly intractable religious and cultural disputes. These conflicts cannot be reduced to secular calculations of interest but must be dealt with on their own terms, a logic very different from the marketplace or realpolitik.

Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.

All those surveyed responded to the same set of deals. First they would be given a straight-up offer in which each side would make difficult concessions in exchange for peace; next they were given a scenario in which their side was granted an additional material incentive; and last came a proposal in which the other side agreed to a symbolic sacrifice of one of its sacred values.

For example, a typical set of trade-offs offered to a Palestinian might begin with this premise: Suppose the United Nations organized a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians under which Palestinians would be required to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel and there would be two states, a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Second, we would sweeten the pot: in return, Western nations would give the Palestinian state $10 billion a year for 100 years. Then the symbolic concession: For its part, Israel would officially apologize for the displacement of civilians in the 1948 war

Indeed, across the political spectrum, almost everyone we surveyed rejected the initial solutions we offered — ideas that are accepted as common sense among most Westerners, like simply trading land for peace or accepting shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. Why the opposition to trade-offs for peace?

Many of the respondents insisted that the values involved were sacred to them. For example, nearly half the Israeli settlers we surveyed said they would not consider trading any land in the West Bank — territory they believe was granted them by God — in exchange for peace. More than half the Palestinians considered full sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light, and more than four-fifths felt that the “right of return” was a sacred value, too.

As for sweetening the pot, in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. Israelis and Palestinians alike often reacted as though we had asked them to sell their children. This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of “business-like negotiations” favored by Western diplomats will only backfire.

Many Westerners seem to ignore these clearly expressed “irrational” preferences, because in a sensible world they ought not to exist. Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters (electricity, water, agriculture, the economy and so on) will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues. But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years’ War — progress on everyday material matters will simply heighten attention on value-laden issues of “who we are and want to be.”

Fortunately, our work also offers hints of another, more optimistic course.

Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.

Remarkably, our survey results were mirrored by our discussions with political leaders from both sides. For example, Mousa Abu Marzook (the deputy chairman of Hamas) said no when we proposed a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return. He became angry when we added in the idea of substantial American aid for rebuilding: “No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount.”

But when we mentioned a potential Israeli apology for 1948, he brightened: “Yes, an apology is important, as a beginning. It’s not enough because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.” His response suggested that progress on sacred values might open the way for negotiations on material issues, rather than the reverse.

We got a similar reaction from Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-line former Israeli prime minister. We asked him whether he would seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region. He answered, “O.K., but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations.”

Making these sorts of wholly intangible “symbolic” concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Shut up about Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh, the Mafia Don of the Republican Party, has come under several verbal attacks by Democrats - and actually, Michael Steele, the new Republican Party chairman, made a disparaging remark and later had to apologize. There's plenty of good reasons to hate Rush: he's foolish, bigoted, etc.

However, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, writing for the American Chronicle, argues that:

By making Limbaugh bigger than life in American politics, it gives steam to his inflammatory campaign of rumors, half truths, distortions, and flat out lies about Obama, liberals, and now Steele. Limbaugh´s aim with Steele is to further cow the GOP into line; the line that forms behind him.

At the start of his tenure as RNC chair, Steele had the good sense to know that kowtowing to Limbaugh was a prescription for even bigger disaster for the GOP. He resuscitated the old Bush line circa 2000, and talked about making the GOP a party of big tent diversity. Then like Bush he promptly forgot it.

Steele, by the way, is the Republican Party's first Black chairman. Hutchinson argues that the Republican Party's core demographic of white blue collar, heartland and deep South voters is only 40% of the entire US electorate. That percentage is shrinking, and the hard core Republicans are unwilling or unable to shift to a platform that would appeal to others. They've already made themselves obsolescent. The Democrats are better off focusing on governing well and leaving the Republicans to whatever fate they choose.

Justice for sale in America

The NY Times has an article about how the CEO of Massey Coal, a large coal miner based in West Virginia, bought a state Supreme Court justice. Again, please note that I changed the title to something less flattering.

MATEWAN, W.Va. — Don L. Blankenship, the chief executive of the nation’s fourth-biggest coal mining company, is not shy about putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to West Virginia politics.

In 2004, he spent $3 million on tough advertisements attacking a justice of the State Supreme Court who was seeking re-election. Some of the advertisements said the justice had agreed to free a sex offender.

“I thought we would beat him more easily than we did,” Mr. Blankenship said, reflecting on how hard it was to persuade voters.

Brent D. Benjamin won that election and went on to join the 3-to-2 majority that threw out a $50 million jury verdict against Mr. Blankenship’s company, Massey Energy.

The question of whether Justice Benjamin should have disqualified himself is now before the United States Supreme Court.

The case, one of the most important of the term, has the potential to change the way judicial elections are conducted and the way cases are heard in the 39 states that elect at least some of their judges. In many states, campaigns for court seats these days rival in both expense and venom what goes on in, say, a governor’s race. Yet it is commonplace in American courtrooms for judges to hear cases involving lawyers and litigants who have contributed to or spent money to support their campaigns.

Mr. Blankenship, a large man with small eyes that betray nothing, does not often sit for interviews. When ABC News tried to ask him questions last year about pictures showing him in Monte Carlo with yet another State Supreme Court justice, he shoved a cameraman and suggested that someone was “liable to get shot” if the journalists persisted.

But Mr. Blankenship seemed eager to tell his side of things over a barbecue chicken lunch in a restaurant here and in the warren of trailers that serve as his office just over the Kentucky line. It is just foolishness, he said, to think that he had spent millions of dollars to gain an advantage in a particular case.

“I’ve been around West Virginia long enough to know that politicians don’t stay bought, particularly ones that are going to be in office for 12 years,” he said, referring to the terms of State Supreme Court justices. “So I would never go out and spend money to try to gain favor with a politician. Eliminating a bad politician makes sense. Electing somebody hoping he’s going to be in your favor doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Massey always has cases,” he added. Indeed, the company is a frequent plaintiff, and it has attracted lawsuits over environmental, workplace safety and labor issues.

“If someone wanted to accuse me of something,” Mr. Blankenship continued, “they would accuse me of trying to elect Benjamin to rule in our favor in hundreds of cases, not one case.”

But that is precisely what some people here, including a retired member of the State Supreme Court, say happened. “We have one justice who was bought by Don Blankenship,” Justice Larry V. Starcher said of Justice Benjamin in 2006, while the two men were colleagues on the court. “It makes me want to puke.”

When the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in November, much of the legal establishment cheered. Here was an opportunity, bar associations and law professors said, to draw a line separating big money from judicial decision making.

But briefs from Massey and its supporters suggest that the case, Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal, No. 08-22, which will be argued on March 3, is more complicated than it first appears.

Mr. Blankenship was, for starters, not a party to the state court fraud case that gave rise to the $50 million verdict. He is not an especially large shareholder of Massey, and he does not stand to win or lose very much — about $175,000, by Massey’s estimates — from its outcome.

On the other hand, Massey has paid Mr. Blankenship handsomely over the years — $23.7 million in salary, bonus, options and other compensation in 2007, by some estimates — and it is hard to disentangle his interests from those of the company.

His direct contribution to the Benjamin campaign was only $1,000, although that is the maximum allowed by law, and he spent most of the $3 million, paid from his own pocket, on television advertisements aimed at defeating the incumbent justice, Warren R. McGraw.

Mr. Blankenship said he was surprised they were not even more effective. “When you’ve got to choose between a guy who released a pedophile and a coal executive, it’s a tossup,” he said.

Mr. Blankenship, who has long been an active participant in the state’s political life, said he had no social or other relationship with Justice Benjamin, who has voted against Massey at least five times.

“Brent Benjamin, rightfully or wrongfully, thinks I had nothing to do with his election,” Mr. Blankenship said.

Justice Benjamin, now the court’s chief justice, declined to be interviewed for this article. In rulings discussing whether he should have disqualified himself from the case, he said he could be fair and impartial.

In a memorandum on Jan. 30, though, Chief Justice Benjamin did temporarily disqualify himself from all Massey cases, saying “it would be personally and judicially disrespectful to the United States Supreme Court and its justices for me to proceed.”

Lawyers for Massey suggest that the case is a Trojan horse whose real intent is to do away with judicial elections because any spending in such elections is suspect. “Any impartiality concerns raised by campaign spending are inherent in the state’s decision to hold judicial elections,” James Bopp Jr. wrote in a brief supporting Massey for the James Madison Center for Free Speech.

The briefs on Massey’s side add that states should be allowed to run their legal systems as they see fit. It would be impossible, they say, to fashion a sensible rule to determine when contributions or independent expenditures should require recusal under the federal Constitution’s due process clause. The other side says it has no problem with elections or financial support. But in rare cases involving especially large amounts from the people involved, they say, judges should be required to disqualify themselves.

Mr. Blankenship’s advertisements, which said Justice McGraw had released a pedophile, were rough and arguably misleading. They concerned a youth who had been sexually abused from the age of 7 by two adult family members and a teacher before going on, at the age of 14, to abuse a younger half-brother. The youth was released on probation soon after he turned 18.

“I’m just a West Virginia country lawyer running for office,” Justice McGraw said. Of the advertisements, he said: “They say our court set a child molester loose in our schools. It’s absolutely untrue. I’m embarrassed to go out in public. They’ve absolutely destroyed me.”

Mr. Blankenship cheerfully conceded that his real objection was to Justice McGraw’s rulings against corporate defendants. “Being the street fighter that I am,” he said, he had instructed his aides to find a decision that would enrage the public.

When they returned with an unsigned opinion in the sex abuse case, which Justice McGraw had joined, Mr. Blankenship said he knew he had hit pay dirt. “That killed him,” Mr. Blankenship said of Justice McGraw, smiling.